


Answer

by ObsidianJade



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: #coulsonlives, Angst, Character Study, Gen, Unhealthy psychological state, out out damned spot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObsidianJade/pseuds/ObsidianJade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint isn't just good at what he does.  He's good at what he <em>is.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Answer

**Author's Note:**

> So, one night, I wondered what Hawkeye's headspace looked like during and after his missions. This is what resulted. I am not a sniper. Therefore, if you are a sniper, you will spot no-doubt glaring inaccuracies. 
> 
> Please be warned that this is NOT A HAPPY STORY. Clint's headspace is a lot darker than I expected it to be, and this is not a candle-in-the-darkness romantic scenario. Warnings also for nongraphic, unnamed target character death and Clint's internal monologue on blood. 
> 
>  
> 
> *In the second section, Clint isn't forgetting Bruce. He just doesn't know how to classify him.

ANSWER 

The pilot smiles faintly, one callused hand looping around Clint’s arm, just above his elbow, to help haul him the last few feet up the ladder and into the bay of the Quinjet. “Welcome back, Agent,” she says, smiling, but her nose wrinkles when she leans to close to him, and she steps back as soon as his knees are on the deck. 

He stinks, he gets it. 

_..he’s been in the same clothes for five days, the closest thing he’s had to a shower was a pack of Wet-Wipes he finished three days ago. His skin is raw under the seams of his clothes, sweat-salt and dust coating every square inch of his body._

“Barton,” comes a level voice from his left, and if he were a little less exhausted he’d have jumped out of his skin at the sound. The pilot dips her head in a nod and goes back to the cockpit, leaving Clint alone and on his knees, staring up at the last person he expected to see.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Medical?” he manages after a long minute. 

Coulson just smiles back, benign as ever, ignoring the fact that the sling keeping his left arm immobile against his chest is putting creases in his suit. There’s a duffle bag in his right hand, battered black nylon scrawled with random sketches and one-word remarks in neon fabric paint. It’s Clint’s bag, the one that’s always brought to him post-mission, but he hadn’t expected to see it in Coulson’s hands for a long time yet. 

“I managed to convince Fury that my floor at the Tower would be more conducive to my recovery than a busy corner of SHIELD’s medical wing,” Coulson answers. His smirk is faint, but Clint’s been working with him too long to be fooled. The man is dripping smugness.

“How was it?” Coulson asks, setting the duffle bag down on the padded bench and unzipping it one-handed. He’s looking down at the contents even though he knows the organization of the bag by heart. Clint appreciates the consideration.

“I shot him. He’s dead.”

_...lying in wait for hours and hours and days because their intel wasn’t specific enough, out in the middle of Nowhere’s sandy asscrack, flat on his stomach on a rooftop, motionless until every part of his body but his trigger finger has gone numb, a migraine screaming behind his eyes from the ceaseless glare of the sunlight and the laser-focus he needed to keep on his surroundings every minute. The hyper-vigilance is so exhausting that he’s too tired to feel anything beyond relief when he finally sees the target step forward, and in between heartbeats he’s painted the bastard’s brain across the sand._

“The usual, then.” Coulson glances at him, then pulls one of the water bottles out of the bag and rolls it across the floor rather than throwing it. Clint, still on his hands and knees on the deck, doesn’t move until he feels the plastic bump against his fingers.

“Yeah,” he answers, rolling back to sit on his haunches before cracking the cap and drinking half of the bottle in two swallows. “The usual.”

Coulson tosses him the bottle of Tylenol 3 next. Clint shakes out the entire contents of the bottle - one pill shy of an overdose, just like he packed it, just so he won’t ever be tempted - and tosses them back without blinking. The rest of the water follows before he breathes again.

It takes a few more minutes and another bottle of water for the decking to stop spinning under his eyes. Once it has, though, he staggers slowly to his feet. Coulson watches him, eyes wary, but he knows better than to offer to help. Clint would fall before he’d lean on a wounded man. 

When he’s on his feet, he stands with his eyes closed, trying to keep as much of the stimulus from his oversensitized nerves as possible, and begins stripping out of his filthy, reeking clothes. His vest comes off easily enough once he shakes loose the sand jamming the zipper, but his undershirt is adhered to him with a miserable combination of dust and dried sweat, and pulling it off feels like tearing open a scab. 

His fingernails are cut down virtually to the quick, but he knows that if he scraped them down the skin of his arm right now, they’d peel away long curls of grime; dead skin and salt and dust, all held together by sunblock and sweat. The skin on the back of his neck is blistered from where he ran out of sunblock yesterday morning, sharp-hot pain when he turns his head, and his hands ache.

“So,” he says, finally opening his eyes when he’s stripped down to filth and skin and is standing naked in front of Coulson, too tired to care even if he’d had any modesty left, “why’d you come all the way out here? Start to worry about me or something?”

Coulson doesn’t blink as he pulls out the oversized Ziplock bag full of damp towels and finagles it open one-handed before passing the first towel to Clint. The cloth is rough and blissfully cool, just wet enough to loosen the grime on his skin when Clint rubs, watching the white cloth turn an ugly grey-brown almost instantly.

“I wasn’t worried,” Coulson answers finally, when Clint’s moved all the way from his left hand up to his shoulder. The whole towel is filthy by the time it’s touching his collarbone; he tosses it aside and accepts the next one. 

“So, what?” Clint asks, skimming the towel over the back of his neck with a wince before starting on his right hand. “You just missed my pretty face?”

There’s an extended pause. “Sitwell makes a mess of your debriefs,” Coulson answers finally, and it’s enough to make Clint laugh despite his agonized head.

Eight towels later, he’s cleaner than he’s been in three weeks and dressed in the clothes out of his bag, clean and soft on his miserable skin, a ninth towel folded and draped over his eyes as he lies on the bench, the top of his head just brushing against Coulson’s thigh as the man sits next to him. 

Coulson’s running the fingers of his right hand in slow circles over the side of Clint’s neck, soothing away a little of the painful tension there as they wait for the Tylenol and codeine to kick in.

__________________________________________________

It’s two days after the mission wrapped, and Clint’s perched on the back of the sofa in the communal living room in Stark Tower, staring at CNN with the sound off and not taking in a single word onscreen, when Stark bursts in, ranting into his phone about unfairness.

By the time Clint finally unearths his attention, buried somewhere at the back of his mind behind the memory of a trigger under his finger, Stark’s flicked the phone conversation onto one of the wall monitors, revealing an irritated Fury on the other end of the line. 

“...and I am sick of being the only one you send out to every press junket! I like publicity as much as the next guy, but, as you keep reminding me, I am not technically a member of your little freak parade, I am a consultant, not your goddamned trick pony, and I am sick of being the one you trot out in front of the cameras every damned time.”

“You’re the one with the most experience in media relations,” Fury answers, his voice admirably level. He’s either been brushing up on his yoga or he’s getting off on pushing Stark around. 

Fifty bucks on the latter if anyone’s stupid enough to bet against him.

“I’m the one with the most experience in fucking up your media relations,” Stark counters, which is actually true. Phil was popping Rolaids for a week straight after the ‘I AM Iron Man’ debacle. And it’s not as if Stark’s their only media pony, either. Rogers knows how to smile pretty for the cameras, and Thor is a natural media sweetheart, which makes about as much sense as the rest of the world they’re living in. 

A bark of laughter from Fury startles Clint out of his train of thought, and he fishes back in his unconscious memory to find what Stark said to get that reaction.

Oh. _“Can’t you make Barton and Widow do it for once?”_

Yeah, that’d do it.

“We don’t do PR, Stark,” he says, turning back to the television, and Stark yelps like a scalded pig and nearly leaps out of his skin.

“What the hell,” Stark says, one hand pressed over the arc reactor, his eyes huge in his face. “How long have you been sitting there?”

On the screen next to the television, Fury’s laughing harder than he has in a decade. 

Clint checks the timestamp on the corner of the CNN feed and blinks when he does the math. “Three and a half hours.”

Stark gapes at him, disbelieving, and Clint stares at the television, pretending to ignore him. Nobody alive outside of Tash and Coulson know how good his peripheral vision is, anyway, so he can pretend as much as he damn well wants. 

Stark’s reaction is really the perfect answer to his own question, if he stops to think about it. Stark and Rogers and Thor, they’re the pretty ones, the bright-and-shinys, the _heroes._

Clint and Tasha, though... they’re killers. 

_The first thing he notices about the suit R &D hands over is that it’s dark, shadow-black with red detail. Even the red is dark, the shade of his work once it’s dried. Tasha’s is black, too, the one spot of color on the whole ensemble the blood-colored hourglass on her belt. _

_It’s the way their jobs are divided, he supposes. They’re both equally guilty, but Natasha’s the one who gets her hands_ dirty, _spends time after the ops cleaning blood out from under her fingernails. She knows how to kill quick and clean, but her weapons are her hands, her body. Killing is something intimate and close for the Widow, her hands glistening with liquid rubies as she declares her assignment fulfilled._

_It’s more remote for Clint. He doesn’t feel the blood under his hands, just the heartbeat of his bow or the rifle they assign him. Maybe that’s why his red is the color of blood that’s already hardened on the dirt, left behind to dry._

“We’re assassins, Stark,” he says when he sees the other man gather himself up again, still not turning his head from the television. “We don’t belong on camera.”

Because even with the red throughout the team - Stark’s armor, Rogers’ shield, Thor’s cape - the rest of them aren’t stained with blood.

_________________________________________________

The next afternoon, Clint’s in the SHIELD cafeteria, halfway through whatever it was he was served - he didn’t even look, and if he’s honest, he doesn’t care. It’s not moving and it’s unlikely to poison him, and in the week after an extended mission, that’s all that matters - when a tray plops down opposite his.

He’s startled enough that he has to freeze so that he doesn’t swallow accidentally and choke himself. He’s not the best of company at the best of times - at any times, really. The regular agents tend to avoid him. 

When he looks up, though, it’s to neatly-combed blond hair and worried blue eyes, and that explains it, because Rogers isn’t a regular _anything_.

“You were on an assignment,” Rogers says, not bothering with any of the polite formalities you would expect. Rogers in general, Clint finds, isn’t really what you would expect. 

“I was,” he answers, chewing while he says it just to annoy the man, and swallowing carefully when those blue eyes flood with sorrow. 

“Tony told me. He said he helped slip Phil onto your extraction flight, and I was watching when you came back in. You looked...”

Rogers trails off, but it’s easy enough to fill in the blanks. Clint knows how he looked when he came back this time; he’s seen it in the mirror often enough before. Sunburned, exhausted, and in pain, he tended to look like a refugee from one of the upper circles of Hell. The drugs had hit him harder than usual after the last mission; Coulson had probably slipped something else into them. Clint couldn’t find the energy to resent it, even when it meant that one of his teammates, probably Rogers, had carried him off the jet and back to his quarters.

“Why do you do it?” Rogers asks softly, sounding mystified. “You’re an Avenger, Clint. You’re doing good with us, here, doing things that need to be done. Any other missions became voluntary when you joined the team, you know that. So why are you putting yourself through these assignments?”

Clint sighs, glancing down at his plate and grimacing when he finds it empty. He’s still hungry, his body struggling to recover after the op, but he doesn’t dare stay here and face up to the Captain’s questions. How can he explain the truth to someone who is so inherently good that he’s blind to the truth in Clint’s uniform, on his hands?

“Think of it this way,” Clint says, collecting the detritus of his meal back onto his tray and swinging off the bench to stand. “If I asked ‘who are you?’ and ‘ _what_ are you?’, you’d give me two different answers, right?”

“...yes,” Rogers answers slowly, his forehead furrowing as Clint stands up, tray in his hands. 

“Ask me,” Clint laughs, humorless and bitter, “and you get one. I’m a sniper.”

_He walks away from the table then, tray steady in his dry-blood stained hands, away from the bright and shining hero behind him, back into the shadows where he belongs._


End file.
